


The Problems with Hope

by SquigglyAverageJoe



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 12:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20817641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquigglyAverageJoe/pseuds/SquigglyAverageJoe
Summary: Stella’s life kind of sucks right now, even though she’s trying very hard to deny it. She’s in love with her best friend, she’s just entered high school and it completely sucks, her parents are always fighting and she’s pretty sure she’s seeing ghosts because for some reason, she has two hearts pounding inside of her chest and she’s pretty sure one of them belongs to this ghost chick because it’s not natural to be born with two hearts.While she spends a lot of her time in her room, writing poetry, singing and sewing and pretending, always pretending things aren’t truly this bad, but she covets the world outside, she wants to leave, she dreams of jumping out of her window and running far, far away from everything to a place where she can feel real happiness and not the fake one she supplies herself with.





	1. Chapter 1

The sound of her fingers hitting the keyboard fills the room—it’s one of those days again. In the last hour, she’s tried playing her guitar, singing the entire soundtrack of _Hamilton_ including _Say No to This_, playing _Twilight Princess_, reading manga, and none of what’s she’s tried has staved off the ever consuming boredom. Nothing grabs her attention like it should. That’s the thing no one tells you about depression—it’s not having a significant other place kiss after kiss on self-harm scars as they bandage a fresh one, it’s not sitting on a roof, watching the sunset while your mascara runs with your tears down your face, and even the way that people who do seem to suffer from depression describe it doesn’t feel accurate, because it’s never felt like Stella’s been chained down in a dark hole, slowly filling with water until she drowns or anything like that—it’s always felt like she’s shrouded in a darkness she can’t see but can feel because it rests on her skin, heavy and tangible and it seeps into her until everything seems just a bit darker than what it really is. No one ever mentioned how dreadfully boring being depressed was.

Nothing was entertaining any more. The way the strings trembled beneath her clingers every time she plucked them seemed barely there and they didn’t sound in tune to her though after ten minutes of trying to tune it, nothing sounded right anymore. _The Schuyler Sisters_ suddenly sounded like nails on a chalkboard. She felt no sort of interest in the plot of the game anymore, even though Zant was one of her favorite _Zelda_ villains of all time and she loved how fucking evil he was and how fucking awesome Midna was, but the controller didn’t really seem to control Link in the game and he was just going down the same path he always did the multiple other times Stella played it. All of the words had lost meaning in and the pictures blurred together. Nothing is working. She feels broken.

She’s been feeling like this for a bit longer than she probably should. She’s been considering suicide for a while too, but knows that’s not an option. After all, she does have a therapist. Well, a behavioral specialist, but her mother likes it when she calls Jane a therapist, because “behavioral specalist” makes her sound “troubled.” Actually, though, Jane was going to another place nearby and would no longer be Stella’s therapist, she had learned when her mother called her out into the living room in tears—because their insurance couldn’t cover where she worked and she assumed Stella would be upset.

She kind of was, but she’d have to suck it up. This was good! Well, not for her, but for Jane, she was getting an improvement in her job, and Jane assured her she’d be left in good hands, a friend of her’s in the same line of work in Richland, somewhere. Jane said she was very kind, patient and liberal and loved every one of her patients and they’d get along just fine and if they didn’t, there was another person Stella could go to, but she was busy for a long while—Stella still had about three weeks left before she could see her.

She’s fine, she decides. She has to be.

In the living room, she can hear her parents arguing and she wants to slam her head into the wall over the topic—pizza.

Her parents are shouting over a pizza that her father claims is a waste of money because her mother didn’t want to cook tonight because she got home from work tired. She was always tired, but tonight was worse than usual because another person quit and it wasn’t like Stella’s father ever cooked. Or cleaned. Or parented. Or did anything productive.

Honestly, her father’s a fucking douchebag.

He gets louder and her heartbeat(s) pick up.

She wants them to stop at the moment.


	2. Chapter 2

Stella is currrently sitting in the dining room at the table. The house is empty—it’s the weekend. Her father usually has that off, but he also usually goes somewhere without telling Stella because he has no concern for her safety, not after what happened a year ago. 

She’s sitting at the only chair with arm rests, texting her best friend while she eats tomato soup and drinks a can of soda. The house is cold. 

Asa’s text is in all caps, _**“LITTLE MISFORTUNE CAME OUT!!**_”

Stella feels herself smile, though she literally only stopped crying. “Yeah, I just finished it.”

”I just started it,” Asa’s text begins. “and like wow.”

”Did you get to the part with the hamster strip club?” I asked.

Asa doesn’t send another text for a minute. Stella tries to wait patiently, but she’s actually slightly scared she said or did something. She thinks about everything she’s said and did. She tries to remind herself that she’s being stupid, but it doesn’t work. What if Asa never responds?

Stella’s been friends with Asa for a good while now and she absolutely adores her. She’s a small Indian girl—her mother immigrated to America when she was young and from all the stories that Stella’s been told about her, she’s probably a goddess. She doesn’t understand much about Asa’s family but that it’s perfect—she’s still astonished by the fact that Asa’s parents _planned_ to have a kid, when with Stella, her mother was on the pill and it still didn’t work. And their condom broke. And Stella’s mom tried to get an abortion, but they didn’t have the money. They never tried to hide it from Stella. As a result, she’s always kind of envied Asa because her life was honestly near perfect and Stella would kill for parents that didn’t fight, but Asa and her family have pretty much let Stella into their family because they’re such nice people and it’s weird to be around people so happy when no one seems happy anymore. It’s a breath of fresh air, really. And the air in her house smells like tobacco and marijuana so.

She isn’t sure how they bonded because when they met they were very different—one of the only things they had in common was that they were both mixed—Stella half-Mexican and Asa half-Indian, and both of their fathers were white. And then on top of that, they breathed oxygen. But not many other similarities. But for the past couple of years, they’ve been really close and they rarely leave each other’s side.

Stella’s pretty sure she’s in love with Asa. Worst part is, she thinks Asa knows. She stirs her soup with her spoon, but it’s cold now. She had looked forward to the release of _Little Misfortune_ because it had just kind of called her name, the demo anyway. She had loved _Fran Bow_ from the same creator and she could remember playing _The Stanley Parable_ with a narrator similar to _Little Misfortune’s_ Mister Voice, and then there was the plot line—a young Mexican girl with an abusive father and an alcoholic mother who knew that her parents wanted to get an abortion and were so horribly unhappy, not to mention Misfortune adored animals, and Stella has been wanting a bunny rabbit for a while now. She had waited eagerly for the release of the game and played it the moment she could.

She remembered _Fran Bow_ vividly, and it made sense that the ending had made just as little sense, but she had seriously been hoping for a happy ending. Misfortune didn’t get one, obviously.

She had really needed something with a happy ending, but she supposed it wasn’t all bad. Kind of sounded like Misfortune got herself a fox boyfriend. A little strange, but good for her, she guesses. Stella had bawled like a small child. She wanted to reach through her computer screen and rescue Misfortune and keep her safe because she had to be protected at all costs. SHe wanted someone to talk video games to, but Asa wasn’t super into video games. Just one visual novel that had something to do with soup that Stella kept meaning to look at.

She hears the side door of the house open. They rarely use the front door because there’s a fence around it and it’s covered in cobwebs, and the side door is easier. She completely freezes in place even though she’s not doing anything wrong, but she knows her father as much as she hates him, and he could get angry over literally anything.

She stares down into the red liquid in her bowl, her fingers limp around the metal spoon. Her phone vibrates briefly—Asa’s name is on the screen. “Just got there. What the fuck?”

Her father’s never been one for parenting, just shouting. Once, Stella said “dang,” when she slammed her hand into a door and her father screamed his head off and cursed like crazy. Maybe he thought she said damn?

”You should really watch a playthrough of Fran Bow,” she texts back. “It’s just as weird.”

Her father walks out of the room without a word. 

Stella tells herself she doesn’t care.

Her mom comes in from work soon, dressed in her uniform, wearing bright red lipstick and smeared mascara. She smiles at Stella. She doesn’t smile back.

She gets mad at her mother often, but she knows it’s not entirely her fault—of course she’d argue with her mother, her mother is the only one doing the parenting. “We’re still going to the mall tonight?” Asa texts her.

”Yeah, at six, right?”

Asa sends her a thumbs up emoji. She feels herself smile.

Her mom’s already agreed to drive her there, she’s already ready, feeling kind of tired, but she doesn’t like being at home. At least, not when her father’s home, due to equal amounts of intimidation and her plain hatred. The fight her parents got into last night didn’t help—her mother had told her father that he needed to quit acting like a child in a temper tantrum and he said he was an adult and could do whatever he wanted.

The drive is silent for a while. Stella just sits there, in the front seat. In the seat behind her mother, a woman with long yellow hair sits, humming Fall Out Boy almost peacefully. Her mother doesn’t see her. Stella’s been seeing a lot of her recently.

Her mother’s already given her twenty dollars and it’s still in her pocket. As they approach the mall, the silence comes to an end.

”Stell,” she starts. “I...I want you to be careful with your money. If there’s any sort of changes at home, you might not get any for a while like this.”

She nods because she understands. Then it clicks. “By ‘changes at home,’ do you mean...like, a divorce?”

Her mother nods, tiredly. “I’ll never give up on your father,” she says. “But...I get the feeling he’s not happy. We’re gonna talk.” Stella gave up on her father about a year ago, which she screamed at him in tears when he reached out to grab her in the middle of an argument. Everyone had thought she was being over dramatic and emotional, but she had been dead serious. Three days after wards, her father had tried to silently hug her, but Stella knew what that meant. That meant pretending. That meant sweeping the mess that her father made under the rug and forgetting about it. She had sidestepped him and he had laughed at her and called her pathetic.

Stella still has nightmares of him.

”Okay,” she says. She’s on the verge of tears. Her mother looks horrified.

”_Mija,_ I’m not leaving you with your friends like this, you can’t cry,” she says softly.

”I’m not crying.” She wants to laugh.

Their car comes to a stop. She hugs her mother tightly. She gets out and waits for Asa in a store.

There’s a spring in her step when she walks into the store. When she sees Asa, she’s grinning.


End file.
